Loose Plate Over a Manhole The Spiritual Scrapbook of a “Team Mennonite” Peter Hoover, Puerto Octay, Chile, 2000 1 The Meeting Behind Costa Rica’s supreme court building where a patch of grass (rare in downtown San José) lies between a side street and their front door, the Quakers have their meetinghouse. We met there, a few Friends and a few Mennonites, trickling in from empty Sunday morning streets before the clerk said, “We should start now.” Then silence came like a dove on the sunlit room. We sat in a circle, some on a sofa, some on stacking chairs between the library and the office. A stuffed literature rack hung beside an open door to the patio. Out there they kept their cleaning supplies, I supposed, behind a wooden door with its corner cut on a slant under the stairway. The sun streamed in through two south windows and made patterns on the hardwood floor. Every person coming in from the street and sitting down made the silence more complete. Our baby sat on the floor, another couple’s baby in a stroller between them. 1 The warbling songs and chirps of birds outside, and once in a while the soft exclamations of our babies playing, echoed through the room. We did not look up. Tom, from California, spoke first. His gentle voice startled us, like the voice from Sinai. What he said about faith (I forget the point) struck us to the heart with its clarity and depth. Then all was silent again. Empty. Yet rich and full. Aware of Christ and one another. Beautifully aware of changing time and self in galaxies spinning around—city and birds and shade trees notwithstanding. Around with the universe, but flowing upward and open on every side to the light. The middle-aged woman in a skirt across from me wore glasses on her common matter-of-fact face—the kind of face one would see behind the counter at the post office. She sat with her eyes closed and her feet side by side on the floor. * * * * * Have we forgotten something? Over a period of years I have met many seekers, unhappy, unfulfilled men and women—a surprisingly large number of them in “Biblical” churches. For a time I was also unhappy and unfulfilled, finding no help in conventional cures: reading up on temperaments and marriage, studying Christian beliefs with their numberless Bible interpretations and doctrines, listening to great preachers, getting involved in religious activity and “service.” Then I rediscovered what some Christians have always known. “Early Christians,” some Eastern and Western believers of the Middle Ages, a few Protestants and nonconformed believers have always lived in a special kind of relationship with Christ. Some know it as the “contemplative way.” Some dismiss it as religious mysticism (believing it to be a great error) and want nothing to do with it. But when I came upon it, in part through the life and thinking of the plain people among whom I grew up, I discovered in it exactly what I needed—and what I suspect others may need as well. 2 What do plain Anabaptists get out of long silent prayers? Why do Friends sit together in meetings, doing “nothing”? For people today, obsessed by a constant need for action, change, sights, sounds, excitement, fulfilment and results, the very idea of waiting in stark simplicity on God is puzzling, or absurd. Some who do not understand, make fun of silent meetings or criticise the “empty” lives of plain groups. Unfortunately, both members and ex- members of those groups, no longer familiar with their spiritual background, contribute to false beliefs about them. I write this book not only to inform you—without emptiness there can be no fullness— but in the firm belief that some of you who read it may be called to what no one has told you much about. To contemplate Christ in a special way may not be everyone’s calling. But it may be your calling, and if it is, you will not be happy or fulfilled until you discover it. For some of us it is not enough just to know “the Bible is true and God exists in heaven.” We long for interactive unpredictable friendship with God. This, in fragmentary “scrap- book” form, because it is hard to write about such things, is how I found it: 2 Fear Born in Kitchener, Ontario, on May 18, 1960, I lived with my parents, two brothers and three sisters, on a farm near the village of Linwood. We belonged to the Orthodox Mennonites, a conservative group among the “team people” (people who use horse- drawn vehicles instead of cars) and sold butter, eggs, and vegetables to customers from the city. 3 Our year’s work began in the greenhouse. In its cheerful warmth—while snow melted outside and a fresh wind fluttered its plastic shell—we transplanted tomato seedlings and flowers in the scent of peat moss, fertiliser, and warm earth. My mother, with a duck apron tied around her skirts, loved to work in the greenhouse. She tended its kerosene stove and opened paper packets from the Ontario Seed Company. “ Ma setze de Zwieble newig ’m Graut (we will set the onions next to the cabbage),” she said. Our little geese also came in the spring. * * * * * Spring break-up flooded the creek beyond our spruce trees and spread in widening lakes across snow-covered fields to the south and west. There, among ever-changing seas and islands to which I gave Dutch or East Indian names I waded in my boots until the sun went down and the flood waters turned red. The sky. I stood still for I had never seen a sky like that before—islands and islands, God rolling back the curtains of glory to palm trees and mountains shining in seas of melting snow. On my way in, where the ice smelled like spruce needles I pried some seed cones loose with my wet fingers. When my mother asked why, I told her, “To keep, for when we move away from here.” * * * * * When the April sun turned warm and the land dried off, we got out the heavy team. From the harrow platform where I stood with the reins taut and four horses plodding on ahead I watched the ploughed earth—soaked, frozen, and snowed-under during the Canadian winter—loosen up to numberless particles rolling and twisting through the harrow’s teeth as the field smoothed out to lie like a bread cloth across the hill. 4 The horses, in the spring sunlight, sweated under their collars and where the traces rubbed. They still smelled like the stable, and I knew that with the sweat, the dust, and the scent of Queen Anne’s lace coming up in the fence rows the work would not stop. Every day, from morning chore time to after the evening meal—all summer long—there would be hay to mow, corn to cultivate, grain to stook, or manure to haul. The big boys would talk loudly and let their shirt-tails hang out. They would wrestle and laugh while pitching sheaves and dig furiously into wagon loads of grain to feed the threshing machine. Back in the straw shed, the air black and rolling with dust, a handkerchief tied over my nose and mouth, my job would be to watch the straw blower. One doesn’t complain. “This we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” Relentlessly the world and the work would go on. But even though it smelled like seeding time, and even though the sun was drying off the land, it stopped on Good Friday. On Good Friday we did not think of working. In calm detachment from all things mundane, refusing to as much as remember the seed grain piled onto the box wagon in the lower driving shed or the binder twine pulled between marking stakes in the garden, my teenage sister and her friend took me with them on a walk after meeting, in our Sunday clothes. In no hurry, listening to birds building nests in the spruce trees, we crossed the cow yard and a bridge. Down to a bend in the creek where my father had long ago stacked a pile of fence rails and left scrapped implements under the willow trees, we walked with our blue song book. Water gurgled over the rocks. Minnows darted about in the pools. Under drooping branches just turning green I sat with the girls in their black dresses for Karwoch (Holy Week). We sang, “Revive us Again.” 5 * * * * * We cleaned house in the spring. Raus mit ’m Gråm (out with the clutter) motivated my mother and big sisters to dig—head scarves tied at the back and sleeves rolled up—into the deepest, darkest closets upstairs, bringing seldom-seen boxes and cardboard barrels out into the light. Their dust rags scented crowded halls and echoing rooms with Amway cleaning fragrance. Mattresses rode out to the top porch to air. Winter bedding—washed to put away—hung flapping in the April sun. Even the stairway to the attic stood open. But no place held a greater attraction to us “little ones” than the Sauwestub (clean room). The clean room, at the southeast corner of the house, upstairs, ordinarily remained off limits. Dark green blinds covered its bay window to the east, and a south window, too high and special to look out through maple trees into the barnyard. I only saw the room when my sisters took their friends into it on Sunday afternoons to admire their growing collection of quilts in cedar chests, their china—all manner of bowls and cups they had received as gifts—arranged on white needlepoint over bureaux they would get from home, and stacks of hooked rugs pulled out from under the bed.